Mark Monster

I read we now have a new preview of the Moonlight runtime. It’s already the fourth preview. I’m giving a test run, just like I gave preview 1 and preview 3 a test run. But this time I did it differently. For the release notes see this page.

What size is the Moonlight runtime actually?

Currently it’s about 9 MiB, what does this mean? That’s this runtime is small as well. That this size is about 50% higher than the Silverlight 3 beta release which has a size of about 6 MiB.

Hunger for resources?

Something else I wanted to see is the resources it’s using. Let’s see what’s happening to the CPU usage when running the Silverlight Toolkit example page? If it keeps running of course. But as the screenshot shows the CPU usage of Firefox the parent process for Moonlight is consuming about 50% of the CPU. When running for a period it keeps consuming around 50% to 80% of the CPU.

Let’s compare the same page to Silverlight, running in Chrome, you will have to search the correct process, because each Chrome Tab is running in it’s own process. But then again it’s still not consuming as much CPU as Moonlight is. It’s around 2% CPU usage.

I would say, besides a lot of problems, the moonlight team definitely will have to work on the performance, because you can expect a little bit of difference in performance but this isn’t what I would expect.

Bugs?

In the last preview the Silverlight Toolkit wasn’t running the charts. It is running it now, isn’t it? Well, for a small period of time it was running, but while writing some parts of this post it stopped running.

Is it running my own website? Of course for me is this very important because I now have a 3D-TagCloud running in Silverlight.

It’s getting better, but still a lot of work. But I like the approach the Moonlight team has while developing the new Moonlight version. It’s more public, compared to Silverlight 3 which only got one beta, and I don’t expect more to arrive because the RTW of Silverlight 3 is announced to be on July 10th.

Do you have Silverlight sites I need to test drive during the next test drive?

Moonlight has a new update. Basically I even missed the second preview. But here the test run of preview 3. The release notes are available here.

I just had to search for updates on my add-ons. Just updated it like any other Firefox add on. And a restart of the browser was all that was needed.

Just giving it the same new try as before.

Of course I start with testing the Silverlight.net site. Does it still work? Yes it does, it even feels a little better. Faster response. But looks are the same, so no new screenshot.

Next is the Silverlight Toolkit Example page for Silverlight 2. Ah my first surprise. It runs, but let’s look at the charts, the browser stops responding.

What about the Silverlight Toolkit examples for Silverlight 3? Still crashes my dear browser.

What about the performance of the Hard Rock deep-zoom site? Yes it feels like it’s better, but I didn’t measure it. But while clicking around a little bit I got this screen and error.

Hmm something else that is interesting to test is the 3D Tag Cloud by Peter Gerritsen will it run? And yes it runs! Interesting.

Hmm, in the end it still not enough for pre-production. But it performs better, at least it feels like it.

Ps. This article is cross posted on: Mark Monster’s blog and Silverlight Help.

Just a few days ago I heard about the Preview 1 version of Moonlight 2.0. Moonlight is the Open Source version of Silverlight that is able to run on Linux. My first reaction was I want to see this, and as soon as possible. So I downloaded the latest Ubuntu CD’s and started installing it on a Virtual PC. An article meant for installing an older version of Ubuntu under Virtual PC helped me.

After that it was very easy just go to the Moonlight 2.0 site and install the Firefox plugin as you would install any other Firefox plugin.

First test: Does it run the menu on Silverlight.net? Yes it does.

Second test: Does it run the Silverlight Toolkit samples for Silverlight 2? No it doesn’t.

Third test: Does it run the Hard Rock deep-zoom site? Yes it does.

Though loading the data is very slow. I’m not sure if that’s because of my network, my vm or Moonlight. After a while this is the new screen.

Because the release notes mentions that some features that are part of Silverlight 3 are already supported. Fourth test: Does it run the Silverlight Toolkit samples for Silverlight 3? No it doesn’t. My whole browser crashed. It was just gone…

Alright what did I expect? ?Not much, but it was an interesting test-drive. And for the future I now have a Linux Virtual PC.

Let’s hope for more stable Previews of Moonlight.

Ps. This article is cross posted on: Mark Monster’s blog and Silverlight Help.

It took the authors of NHibernate in Action a very long time to complete this book. It was already in the summer of 2006 that I got involved in the NHibernate in Action book.

First steps were basically reviewing the first chapters manuscript. Later on I also reviewed other chapters. About half a year ago, or maybe it was even three quarter of a year ago (time goes fast these days), Manning asked me to do the Technical Proofreading of NHïbernate in Action. In het end the book finally got to print. And yes I really like it.

Although I would have been very happy to have this book in the year 2006, I’m glad to have it now. Besides the fact that this is a NHibernate book, it also covers ORM in general. And a lot patterns and concepts discussed in this book apply to other ORMs as well, like Linq2SQL and the Entity Framework.

I’m an very enthusiastic ReSharper user before ReSharper 1 was even released. Just using beta’s in that era. One of the nice features ReSharper offers is the code analysis. I really like it, although I’ve used Coding Analysis that was offered by Visual Studio 2005 in the past. I had never used it in Visual Studio 2008, I do not even know if it still exists in Visual Studio 2008. But we have something new now: StyleCop

StyleCop

StyleCop can be downloaded from MSDN Code Gallery. StyleCop can enforce style rules. This is something that a lot of companies want to be enforced. Besides the fact I really like style to be enforced. It becomes even nicer, StyleCop can be integrated into ReSharper. You will need the StyleCop for Resharper plugin from CodePlex for this integration.

I’ve tried it on a personal project and yes I kind of like it. I want to tweak it in some parts, but it’s something that helps enforcing me to add comments for example. Tweaking is very easy.

Note: I copied the images from StyleCop for Resharper codeplex site.

In June this year an article from my hand about Aspect Oriented Programming (AOP) was published in the Dutch .NET Magazine. It’s about partly about AOP in general and partly about the usage of PostSharp. You can download the article here. You can read about my other articles here and here. Let me know what you thing about the article.

I thought why not upgrade the WordPress since I was a lot of versions behind. I first looked at the different steps that are required to upgrade to the new version. Just four steps:

1. Delete your old WP files, saving ones you’ve modified.
2. Upload the new files.
3. Point your browser to /wp-admin/upgrade.php.
4. You wanted more, perhaps? That’s it!

Yes just four steps. You didn’t even need to make a backup first it seams. I’m glad I did make a backup, specially of the database. So which are the troubles I had to overcome.

The white page

I just went to the blog’s homepage, but saw nothing, yes just nothing. The management interface did work though. So when I went to the Design section I found out the theme doesn’t work anymore. Not only this, it was also removed from the blog. Very strange, so I selected the WordPress default theme to have at least something online.

The categories

I though a not supported theme, that can happen. But when looking at the default page I saw a list of empty categories, yes empty categories only the amount of posts in each category was shown. This did make me feel a little bit angry, where are categories gone to? After some Googling I found out people who have the same people including this by hand solution. Beside the missing of the category names also the hierarchy is lost. I didn’t fix the hierarchy because my new theme doesn’t support hierarchical categories.

The theme transition

Because the failure of my old theme I got looking into a new one. So goodbye Connections Reloaded.

Welcome Dreamplace.

Some time ago I sort of complained there’s no Mocking Framework available for Silverlight. This has a lot to do with the not being available Castle’s DynamicProxy for Silverlight. So I did some analyzing on DynamicProxy if it’s possible to make it work under Silverlight.

Read the rest of this entry »

Just about two weeks ago the Microsoft patterns & practices team released a Community Technology Preview of the Unity project. Unity is a lightweight Dependency Injection Container. I’ve just been using it in some very basic scenario’s, so far I like it. It has support for constructor and property injection. But also, a thing not many Dependency Injection container support I think, the ability to do method call injection.

David Hayden has some post on Unity on his blog. But most of all he has created a screencast on Unity, very nice to get an introduction to Unity.

Unity already gets some attention on the Internet. Oren Eini, a guy that’s very experienced on Dependency Injection and did some coding on Castle Windsor another Dependency Injection container, has done a review on Unity.

Let’s wait for the final release. Maybe I will add it to my toolbox. It still seams customers like open source projects from Microsoft more than open source projects from different hand. Maybe I will be able to apply Dependency Injection using Unity at a customers place.

Years ago, during my study Computer Science I developed in Java. The last of my Java years I made use of IntelliJ IDEA as my Java environment. IntelliJ IDEA is a very intelligent IDE from the same guys as ReSharper. I wasn’t using a source-control system but made use of a very nice feature: Local History.

I just found out a CodePlex project: Visual Local History 2005. Visual Local History is a Visual Studio 2005 and 2008 add-in that will provide some kind of Local History. It can integrate with some predefined comparison tools. Sadly it is still in Beta, but will that prevent us from using it? At least it is  released in GPL.

I’m not advocating using Local History as a replacement for source-control, but sometimes the changes you made are very large and it takes some time before you are able to check your into your source-control. I think Local History can work without any trouble side-by-side with your source-control. This way you won’t loose any control by not using a source-control. You’re even gaining control by the ability to browse through your local changes.

This all sounds very nice. This kind of local history could be nice for using with all kinds of documents.